It shocked RoBards to think that marriage had not changed the restless girl to a staid matron. That she should want to waltz was peculiarly harrowing, for this new and hideously ungraceful way of jigging and twisting was denounced by all respectable people as a wanton frenzy, heinously immoral, indecently amorous, and lacking in all the dignity that marked the good old dances. But he was in a mood to grant her anything she wished. She had a right to her wishes now, for she was granting him his greatest wish; a son and heir was mystically enfolded in her sweet flower-flesh, as hidden now as the promise of the tulip tree in a bud that hardly broke the line of a bough in the early spring, but later slowly unsheathed and published the great leaf and the bright flower. So he bade the servants pack her things and his, and they set out again for New York. Now the tide flowed back with them as it had ebbed with them. The exiles were flocking once more to the city, and new settlers were bringing their hopes to market. A tide of lawyers and merchants was setting strong from New England, and packs of farmers who had harvested only failure from the stingy lands, counted on somehow winnowing gold on the city streets, where sharpers and humbugs of every kind would take from them even that which they had not. The drive to New York was amazingly more than a mere return along a traveled path. Though they had gone out in a panic, they had been enveloped in a paradise of leaves and flowers and lush weeds, as well as in a bridal glamor. Now they went back under boughs as starkly bare as the fences of rail or stone; only the weeds bore flowers, and those were crude of fabric as of hue. And the hearts of the twain were already autumnal. Their April, June, and August of love were gone and November was their mantle. Patty’s orange blossoms were shed, and they had been artificial, too. Below White Plains the road was a-throng with cattle that frightened Patty and the horses. When they were clear of these moving shoals, they came into the Post Road where the stages went like elephants in a panic. But Patty found them beautiful. She rejoiced in the increasing crowds, and as the houses congregated about her, and the crowded streets accepted her, she clapped her hands and cried: “How good it is to be home!” This sent a graveyard chill through RoBards’ heart, for it meant that home to her was not in the solitude of his heart, but in the center of the mob. Home was to her more definitely the house in Park Place, her father’s house to which he must take her till he found another lodging. Her father and mother greeted her as a prodigal and him as a mere body servant—which was what he felt himself to be.